So here’s the thing, My Fiance and I are paying for this entire wedding ourselves. Our budget was set at $10,00 and although we haven’t paid for everything yet, it looks like were going to end up paying about $13,000. My Fiance has a huge family and in his culture (Mexican) family is pretty much everything. I would love to have an intimate 50 people wedding but I understand that I am marrying into a larger family and that isn’t going to happen. I have accepted that and perfectly fine with it. The problem is that with our venues we pay per person because catering is included. I really don;t have to invite a household with 4 people and receiving the return card to find that the count is now 6 due to plus ones. I was thinking that I should list each and everyone’s name with a place to mark attending or not attending. My Uncle was telling me that proper etiquette would be to just write ABCD and Family. Is it rude to list each persons name to help limit the chances of +1’s showing up and having to pay extra?

If you haven;t guessed already, yes we are making our own invitations. Nothing too fancy!

Also I had read on other post’s a lot of people literally right on the invitations no plus one’s but I can’t figure out a nice considerate way to say that.

@Carrielicious: We wrote everyone’s name on the outer envelope and on the RSVP, listed ‘We have reserved seats in your honor’ and just filled in the number before we sent each invite. No one exceeded the number we wrote on their RSVP card and several people that wanted to invite a +1 just called us and since we had enough regrets, we agreed to all requests. I REALLY thought all of our guests would come because almost all of our guests are local, so I was very surprised that we had so many regrets!

Also, we made our own invites 🙂 VERY affordable. I bought thick paper and nice envelopes, downloaded a free trial of Adobe Illustrator, and used a fancy font to create our invitation suite. I printed them at a printing store and used their cutting boards to make nice clean cuts. I also purchased a rounded corner punch to make the edges of our invitations look professional. So easy and so inexpensive!

@Dareebs: Wow thanks a lot that is a great idea! I have pretty much all of the invited put together but have yet to send anything out to be printed becase I wasn’t sure how to keep out number in line. I love your idea of writing we have black seats in your honor. I am going to use that on my invitations!!!

We wrote “We have reserved ___ seats in your honor” and wrote out exactly who was invited on the envelope. I don’t think it’s rude to write out each person’s name on the RSVP but it is a lot of extra work! If someone does write an extra person on there just call them and explain that space is limited.

Or something like that. We filled in the second blank with the number invited, so it was very clear whether someone got a +1 or not.

We also wrote out everyone’s names for the most part. For some typical nuclear families (John and Jane are married, with two kids), we just put “Mr. and Mrs. John Smith and family” to indicate that kids were invited. For couples or single people, I wrote ‘Ms. Jane Doe and Mr. John Smith” or “Miss Jane Doe and Guest” or just “Miss Jane Doe” if there was no +1.

Hopefully I made that clear? Ha. I just finished my invites, so my mind is spinning with address ettiquette!

Proper etiquette requires that you invite each guest, by name, by means of an inviation sent to his or her own address. “And Family” is not a name, and it shows disrespect for the junior members of the family who are lumped together and not named.

The best way to make it absolutely clear, is to name the invitees directly on the invitation itself. Like this, if it is a formal wedding:

Then it doesn’t matter if you have inner envelopes or not, or what you write on the R.s.v.p. card: it is clear in black-and-white (or whatever colour you are making your invitations in) exactly who is invited.

Most properly, etiquette does NOT have you sending R.s.v.p. cards at all — that suggests to your guests that you don’t trust them to know how to reply on their own. What they are supposed to do is take their own stationery and write by hand

Now, since it is quite possible that, in fact, you cannot trust your friends to know that, you may decide to use R.s.v.p. cards anyway. I wouldn’t — some brides have tried leaving them out and been pleasantly surprised by how many people did figure out how to reply on their own. But if you do use R.s.v.p. cards, wording them in the traditional proper form with all the names listed out makes more sense to me than any of the options.